Links

He was born at Cana and brought by the Apostle Philip to meet Jesus. Nothing further is known for certain. Eusebius speaks of him in India, but the Roman Martyrology has him martyred in Armenia, skinned alive according to the Persian custom. Because his relics were enshrined on the island in the Tiber that is principally used as a hospital, he has become a patron saint of the sick.

About the author of the Second Reading in today's Office of Readings:

Second Reading: St John Chrysostom (349 - 407)

John was born in Antioch. After a thorough education, he took up the ascetic life. He was ordained to the priesthood, and became a fruitful and effective preacher.

He was elected Patriarch of Constantinople in 397, and was energetic in reforming the ways of the clergy and the laity alike. He incurred the displeasure of the Emperor and was twice forced into exile. When the second exile, to Armenia, had lasted three years, it was decided that he should be sent still further away, but he died on the journey, worn out by his hardships.

His sermons and writings did much to explain the Catholic faith and to encourage the living of the Christian life: his eloquence earned him the surname “Chrystostom” (the Greek for “golden mouth”).

Liturgical colour: red

Red is the colour of fire and of blood. Liturgically, it is used to celebrate the fire of the Holy Spirit (for instance, at Pentecost) and the blood of the martyrs.

Other notes: Monsignor Ronald Knox (1888 - 1957)

Ronald Arbuthnott Knox was born into a Church of England family (his father later became Bishop of Manchester and his grandfather was Bishop of Lahore), and had a brilliant career at Oxford and afterwards in the Church of England. He was received into the Catholic Church in 1917, after having inspired many of his friends to do the same.

Throughout the 1920s and 1930s he was one of the Church’s great apologists both in the newspapers and in books, making his points with equal parts of wit, charity, and cogency. Several of his opponents joined the Church in their turn, not coerced or converted by him, but inspired by his example and with their difficulties removed.

He was the Catholic Chaplain at Oxford from 1926 to 1939, where he equipped several generations of young men for the difficult transition from Catholic schools, where the faith was taken for granted, to the wider world, where it was met with indifference or outright hostility.

He translated the entire Bible into English, both the Old and the New Testaments, in a heroic single-handed project undertaken at the request of the English Catholic bishops; but it is by his spiritual writings (especially A Retreat for Lay People) and by his apologetic and doctrinal works that he is most worthily remembered.

God has entrusted to us the news of reconciliation. So we are ambassadors for Christ; it is as though God were appealing through us, and the appeal that we make in Christ’s name is: be reconciled to God.

The apostles left the presence of the Sanhedrin glad to have had the honour of suffering humiliation for the sake of the name. They preached every day both in the Temple and in private houses, and their proclamation of the Good News of Christ Jesus was never interrupted.